Kevin Kelleher

One of the best business books ever written is Studs Terkel's Working. It inspired in me the habit of asking people about their work when I can, a topic I find endlessly if bizarrely fascinating. After all, work is as much a part of the fabric of daily lives as family – in many cases it's woven more deeply – so it's a quick way to get insight into someone, but it also satisfies whatever curiosity that made me a business journalist.

Google has entered another one of its periods of languishment. Back in 2007, the company's stock reached $358 a share, then needed another five years to exceed that peak. Once it did, Google rallied 71 percent over the next 18 months, rising as high as $614 a share early last year. Since then, Google has drifted sideways to down. It's trading around $575, after falling below $500 earlier this year.

The thing about investment conferences is that they're staged events staged by people who have no business even trying. There are awkward moments aplenty, long pauses in Q&As, and – above all – unrehearsed statements intended to be clever but that fall flat. It's improv done by people whose performative gifts die outside of the conference room.

As a business journalist, I'm normally shy about writing about my personal life but I'd like to share a story about my Dad. In the early 2000s, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's. Anyone who has had a loved one suffer from a neurodegenerative disorder knows what followed was as sad and brutal as it was irreversible.

Sometimes it seems like the tech industry is its own little world, comfortably insulated from the turmoil that might be happening in other parts of the global economy. That seemed the case back in 2009, when the streets of San Francisco seemed much more bustling with startup activity than anywhere else in the country.

Five years after the Great Recession ended and 15 years after the dot-com boom went bust, the IPO market for tech companies looks to be roaring back. But although it can be said that this was the busiest year for US IPOs since 2000, a closer look at the numbers shows that, in some ways, 2014 was something of a letdown.

Peer-to-peer businesses are seeing something of a rebirth. After early Internet startups like eBay and Napster built their business models on peer-to-peer technology, the social media sites that drove the second wave of the web stole their thunder.